


The Only Light in the Darkness

by anextraordinarymuse (December_Daughter)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 21:32:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13796766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/December_Daughter/pseuds/anextraordinarymuse
Summary: Melinda May isn't about this "life without Phil Coulson" nonsense, so she does the only thing she can: drags his sorry ass out of Hell (or the closest thing she's ever seen to it).Loosely based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.





	The Only Light in the Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have the first clue where this idea came from. I just sat down and started writing, and here we are. It's probably one of the stranger things I've written, so there's that. I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Melinda wakes and knows that something is wrong.

 

She sits up in bed and counts her breaths while she tries to get her bearings. The air is warm and sweet – summer, she thinks. Sunshine streaks in through the blinds; a bird chirps outside the window.

 

Melinda is on breath thirty-two and still the sense of wrongness tightens her chest. It’s like a mantra that repeats with every heartbeat: _wrongwrongwrong_!

 

She twists at the waist and glances at her side table. A framed picture of her and Andrew on the beach stares back at her, but she can’t remember when or where it was taken.

 

A trick, she thinks. This is a trick.

 

“Honey?”

 

Melinda turns to see Andrew blinking blearily at her as he rolls onto his side. He smiles a bit and reaches for her. His hand is missing.

 

“Everything okay?” Andrew asks.

 

Something is missing. The realization hits her like an anvil that passes through the top of her head and sinks deep into her gut.

 

Melinda doesn’t answer. Instead, she kicks back the blanket and stands. She’s in jeans and a dark t-shirt instead of pajamas. Somehow, the jeans seem right. She leaves the bedroom and ignores Andrew when he calls her name again.

 

Her house looks exactly the same as it did the day she left Andrew. There are a few additions, though, like new pictures on the wall and a little vase of daisies on the table in the entry way. The daisies strike her the hardest, though she can’t place why.

 

It’s not something that’s missing, it’s someone. Melinda is certain of that in a way that she can’t explain. That feeling in her chest has changed, though, an uneven litany of _wrongmissingwrongmissing_ that won’t leave her alone as she makes her way to the front door.

 

There is something off about this place. It’s hers and not hers, real and not real; not just the house, but … everything. The air, Andrew, the fact that she’s here at all …

 

“I’m not supposed to be here,” Melinda says to empty air. She glances at the daisies. “I don’t want to be here.”

 

So much time has passed. “Time doesn’t exist,” two voices say together. One she recognizes, and one she doesn’t. Still, time has passed; too much, maybe. Years, or centuries, or even longer. Melinda has been in the house forever.

 

And as soon as she thinks it, the house is gone. Melinda stands alone in nothingness. The void stretches out forever, a dark thing she can only sense and not see. There’s no end, and no beginning, and her head starts to ache with the unknowable vastness of it all. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and clenches her fist to feel her nails bite into her palm.

 

_Someone is missing_ , her heart whispers.

 

“Someone is missing,” Melinda tells the darkness.

 

A single flame ignites some distance ahead of her. There is no wind, yet it pulses and jumps as if fighting back a storm front all on its own. Melinda tells herself to walk and knows she’s moving, but there are no footsteps. She keeps her eyes fixed on that indomitable flame and continues.

 

The flame gets bigger and flares blue, then orange, then blue again as she moves closer.

 

“Go back.” The voice is menacing and firm and comes from everywhere at once. “Go back,” it says again. “There is nothing for you here.”

 

Melinda keeps going. The flame expands until it’s a small fire that burns at eye level.

 

“Why are you here?”

 

“Someone is missing.”

 

“Why are you here?” that dark voice booms.

 

Melinda pauses. The fire dances just out of reach, the flames blue and orange and yellow, and it’s hers. It’s another of those immutable things that she doesn’t question. That fire is hers to protect, hers to retrieve, hers despite the winds that buffet and beat at it.

 

She wasn’t looking for it, but she can’t leave without it.

 

“I’m searching,” she says.

 

“There is nothing for you here.”

 

There’s a name on the tip of her tongue. A face that she knows yet can’t recall hides just beyond her line of sight. Melinda is grasping for it, but it won’t come to her. What – who is it that she can’t remember?

 

Again, the thought comes to her that too much time has passed. Lifetimes have gone by; she has walked through centuries in this darkness, the rise and fall of empires, and time streaks by her now as if she were a boulder in a stream. The longer Melinda remains the hollower she becomes, and the emptier she feels.

 

The longer she hesitates the farther that precious flame drifts away from her.

 

Melinda’s hypersensitivity tells her that someone is in the darkness with her. She can’t tell how long they’ve been there, or even where they’re at exactly. It’s another of those unquestionable things that she knows: she’s not alone here.

 

The flame is dying down again, and just for a second it shifts strangely and turns a pale, familiar blue, and Melinda sees the barest outline of a face.

 

“Phil,” she says. Her spine straightens and her shoulders square, because she remembers now. “You took someone from me, and I’m here to take him home.”

 

The flame blazes orange and lengthens. Melinda finds herself quite suddenly looking at the Ghost Rider. He’s not just the Ghost Rider though: the flaming skull is hard to deny, but the body is Phil’s. He’s still wearing his leather jacket and dark blue button up.

 

“The Rider is hard to resist,” Robbie had told her before she’d set out on this insane rescue mission. “The longer he stays, and the more you give in, the harder it is to come back at all. I can help you find him, but there might not be anything left of Coulson when you do.”

 

Melinda pushes the memory away. “I’ve come for Phil Coulson.”

 

The Ghost Rider cocks his head at her. “That name,” it says in two voices. One she recognizes and one she doesn’t; the mouth on the skull doesn’t move.

 

“Your name,” Melinda says. This is the Rider, but it’s also Phil, and that’s the side she has to reach. He’s a talker, so maybe if she can get him going … “Where are we?”

 

“Between.”

 

“Between what?”

 

“Everything.”

 

She wonders if she’s standing face to face with the Devil, and if her quest to save the man she loves has brought her to the doorstep of Hell.

 

Robbie had said that he’d sold his soul to the Devil.

 

“Phil,” Melinda says desperately. That hollow feeling is getting worse. She’s running out of time before she’ll be stuck here, before there won’t be enough left of her to return – but she’s not leaving without him. “Come with me. Please.”

 

“The Rider must have a host,” the dual voices say. The unfamiliar one is stronger.

 

“Then pick someone else,” May snaps.

 

“You?”

 

“No.”

 

Melinda is despairing. In the real world – her world – Phil has been gone for months. Not dead, exactly, but claimed by the Rider and taken from them just the same. What if she’s too late? What if this attempt is doomed to fail because she waited too long?

 

“Even now, he fights,” the Rider says, the familiar voice strongest, and a spark of hope lights in her breast.

 

“Tell me what to do,” Melinda pleads. “There has to be a way.”

 

The Rider hesitates, then holds out an upturned hand. “A test.” Three guns appear on a low table in front of him. “Correctly identify which belongs to the man you seek, and you may leave with him.”

 

“What’s the catch?” May asks, ever suspicious.

 

“He will follow you, but you must not look upon him until he’s once again in the light. If you fail – if you look back for any reason before the light has reached him – he’ll remain here with me. Forever.”

 

Melinda looks at the guns. They’re identical in every way. She studies them for a heartbeat and then picks up the first one. A seething, white-hot hatred and furious anger seep out of the metal and into her hand, so potent that she nearly drops it. Instead, she places it carefully on the table and picks up the second gun: a bittersweet sorrow that cuts her to the quick is her reward. That one goes back on the table, and she picks up the third: for a moment there’s nothing, and then … relief. Relief and a sense of righteousness, of familiarity. Melinda sets the last gun down.

 

“Well?” the Rider demands.

 

Melinda takes a deep breath and stares at the flaming skull. Somewhere within that conflagration is that small flame, blue and orange and fierce, and it’s hers. Hers to protect; hers to seek and keep. “All of them,” she says. “They’re all his.”

 

The flame, and the Rider, and the light – it all vanishes. Melinda is once again plunged into darkness, with only the vague sense of what the Rider had called _Between_.

 

“Go,” a single voice says.

 

“Phil?”

 

“He will follow. Remember …”

 

“No peeking,” Melinda cuts him off acerbically.

 

Her feet weigh two ton each as she turns on her heel and wills herself to move. There’s no direction here, no way to know if she’s going the right way, but she follows the little tug in her chest that whispers _homehomehome._ That sense of wrongness has only worsened, though, and every few heartbeats it threatens to drown out the sense of home.

 

Melinda forges ahead. She’s not meant to be here, and the truth of that is only becoming clearer as she goes. This place is wrong, and her presence here is wrong, and how is it possible that she made it this far in the first place? That aching emptiness in her is threatening to swallow her – whatever this place is, it’s sucking her dry.

 

She’s hollowing out, and she has no idea how to get out of this inky black nothingness, and she’s going to die here.

 

“It’s a trick,” Melinda says out loud. The sound of her own voice does her good; her steps feel lighter. “Keep going, May.”

 

This is working. She’ll get Phil back and then she’ll yell at him for being such an idiot, and then maybe ignore him for a day, and then let him apologize to her – at length. Maybe she’ll even put out the mats and kick his ass.

 

“Turn back.” The voice is feminine, high and worried and sweet. “Turn back, you’ve been tricked.”

 

“You’re alone,” another voice whispers. “No one follows.”

 

Another voice chimes in, and another, until there’s a chorus of whispers that Melinda can only pick a single word out of: alone. She ignores them and tries not to think that she has no sense of being followed, and she’s spent longer in this darkness than she should have. Why is it still so dark?

 

“We should be out of this,” she says.

 

She’s standing in the foyer of her old house again in the span of a breath. That vase of daisies is still on the entry table, but Melinda knows why they’re there now: to remind her that this isn’t real, and that her team is waiting for them.

 

“Mellie?” her father calls from somewhere in the house. “I know you’re looking at those pictures again.” He appears at the top of the steps that lead up to the bedrooms, and his face is so kind and familiar … “Stop,” he tells her, “Phil is gone. It’s time you let him go.”

 

And Melinda can’t help it: she glances at the pictures on the wall next to her. There are a few with her and Phil from the Academy, and a few in SHIELD offices, but the ones that hit her hardest are the candid ones. The two of them under an umbrella on a city street, arm in arm; Phil and Melinda gazing lovingly at each other in the pew of small church at someone else’s wedding; a photo of Phil front and center with his left hand held up and his other pointer finger pointing at his wedding ring with a comically surprised face, while Melinda is in the background with a fondly exasperated expression.

 

“Let him go, Mellie,” her father says. “He’s gone.”

 

Her muscles twitch with the intense need to turn around, but she doesn’t. Until he’s once again in the light, the Rider had said, and even though there’s sunlight all around them it doesn’t feel right. There’s something wrong, but she doesn’t know what because everything is wrong.

 

Melinda doesn’t know where to go from here. Robbie had done some weird voodoo magic crap to get her here – wherever here is – but even he hadn’t known how to get her back. “As far as I know, this has never been done,” he’d told her.

 

That hadn’t stopped her before, but now … Melinda doesn’t know what to do. How does she get out of this Between? If she can’t get out does Phil go back to the Rider and she just … dies? She’s not afraid to die, but she’ll be really pissed off if she fails right here at the end.

 

May closes her eyes. “Damn it, Phil,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say.

 

And this is his fault, after all.

 

Something pops in her chest. It’s slightly painful, like a bone that’s been knocked out of place suddenly realigning itself, and she gasps at the intensity of the sensation.

 

That wrongness is gone.

 

“Oh my god, May!” Jemma exclaims.

 

“Did you see that?” Fitz asks. “She just popped out of thin air. How is that possible?”

 

Another trick, Melinda wonders? She opens her eyes but doesn’t move. She’s in the lab, which is where she was when Robbie did whatever it was, and everything looks right – including Jemma, who’s crowding into her space to make sure she’s alright.

 

No one has said anything about Phil though. Why wouldn’t they … unless he isn’t there?

 

Then, “May?”

 

Melinda tenses on a shiver. His voice sounds exactly like it should, exactly like she remembers it. It’s been months since she last heard it, though, and she’s terrified to turn around. Why the hell hadn’t she thought to clarify what “light” meant? The lab is as bright as ever, but that house she’d just left had been light as well, and how the hell is she supposed to know what damn light was the right one?

 

“Coulson,” Daisy says in wild relief.

 

“Jemma,” May murmurs. When Jemma looks at her she says, “Can you see him? Is Phil behind me?”

 

Jemma is confused by the question, but she glances over May’s shoulder and then smiles reassuringly. “He’s here. You did it, May. I don’t know how, but you did it.”

 

“May?” Phil asks again.

 

Slowly, Melinda turns. Phil is standing less than a few feet behind her and looking just the same as the last time she’d seen him, though maybe with a little more scruff. He’s still wearing that damn leather jacket and blue button up.

 

The relief is so acute it drowns her. Melinda crashes into him in an emotional hug and they cling to each other tightly right there in the middle of the lab. He’s alive and warm against her, and Melinda remembers again that single flame flickering stubbornly in the face of whatever dark winds had buffeted it.

 

Phil smooths down her hair with one hand and says, “Boy am I glad to see you guys.”

 

Melinda finally lets him go and moves away to collect herself while the kids gather around Phil and pester him with alternating hugs and questions. Nothing too involved – mostly just “are you injured, sir?” from Jemma and “can I get you anything?” from Daisy – and through it all May just breathes and tries to dispel the tension holding her together.

 

Melinda disappears when an excited Mack and Elena show up. The reunions are sweet and she’s glad to see them, but whatever she’s just done and been through has left her exhausted and somewhat shaken. Melinda doesn’t have words for what she experienced. She doesn’t really want to talk about it, either, so she leaves instead of waiting around to be grilled.

 

May goes to her room and kicks off her shoes. Perhaps the most persistent reminder that what she went through was somehow real is the weariness she feels: like she’s a bucket that has repeatedly been emptied and then refilled, or a bowl that has had everything scraped out of it and then filled. She’s tired, but uncertain whether or not she can sleep.

 

The knock on her door isn’t unexpected. Seeing it open seconds later to reveal Phil is a novelty though, and a sight May hasn’t seen in so long that she might cry.

 

Phil doesn’t speak. He steps into the room and shuts the door behind him, and when he crosses to her there’s something between them that has always been there – and not. It’s intention, Melinda thinks, where before there had been possibility.

 

“I think you literally went to Hell and back for me today,” Phil says gently.

 

“Didn’t leave me much of a choice,” Melinda fires back.

 

Phil cups her face in his hands. “I’m sorry.” The words are soft – intimate. He’s apologizing for so much more than Melinda can wrap her head around right now. “How did you find me?”

 

“I don’t know. I just knew that I had to.”

 

She pushes up onto her toes at the same moment that Phil leans forward, and the press of their lips sets Melinda’s heart racing. Maybe it’s too soon, after everything, maybe it’s ill-advised and reckless, but it’s absolutely necessary.

 

Melinda slips her hands under his shirt to rest on his hips and pulls him into her. Phil sweeps one hand back to cup the back of her head and the other hand starts to tug at his jacket. Melinda takes the hint and shoves it off his shoulders without taking her mouth from his.

 

They move together toward the bed. Melinda stops when her knees hit the frame, and Phil takes the moment to pull away from her mouth and breathe raggedly. For a moment they just stand there and try to work each other out. This is their moment of no return, Melinda thinks: they either go forward now, or never. This is the last stopping point they’ll have, and whatever happens, it’s for good.

 

Melinda has walked through time to bring him back. She’s brushed past the ages of the world, and maybe of other worlds as well, and the heavy darkness of what the Rider had called Between is not something she’ll easily forget.

 

Even in that eternal nothingness, Phil Coulson had been her only light in the darkness.

 

Melinda tugs her shirt off over her head and drops it carelessly at her feet. That’s the only signal Phil needs to do the same, and when he reaches for her again Melinda hops up into his arms and locks her legs around his waist as he kisses her with fervent abandon.

 

This time, it takes him less than ten seconds to unsnap her bra. Melinda grins at him when she stops kissing him long enough to discard the garment, and then kisses away his answering smile.

 

They crash to the bed, Melinda pinned between Phil and the mattress, and he’s careful not to crush her in their graceless fall.

 

This, Melinda decides, isn’t just worth the wait – it’s worth going to Hell for all over again.

 

Later, when they’re both spent and pleasantly tired, Melinda rolls onto her side and lays her head on Phil’s shoulder. His arm wraps around her waist and holds her against him.

 

“If you ever do that to me again,” she informs him, “I’ll kill you.”

 

His laughter is muted thunder beneath her ear. “Noted.”

 

When Melinda falls asleep, her dreams are full of warmth and light and a little blue-orange flame that rises up to greet her as if it’s always been waiting for her.


End file.
